FROM CUSTODY TO CRIMINALIZATION: POLICE MISCONDUCT, TRAUMA, AND YOUTH REOFFENDING IN BANNU, PAKISTAN
Abstract
This study examines how police misconduct during custody functions as a criminogenic mechanism shaping youth reoffending in District Bannu, Pakistan. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews with incarcerated youth, criminal defense lawyers, and jail administration officials, the research analyzes how coercive policing practices particularly custodial violence, sexualized torture, illegal detention, and coerced confessions transform state authority from a deterrent into a driver of criminalization. Thematic analysis reveals that custodial abuse is not episodic but routinized, embedded within institutional cultures marked by colonial legacies, weak accountability, and limited investigative capacity. Youth narratives document severe physical and psychological trauma, humiliation, and loss of dignity, which erode perceptions of legal legitimacy and reconfigure moral reasoning toward defiance, retaliation, and acceptance of criminal identity. These effects are reinforced through labeling processes and the near-absence of effective redress mechanisms, producing pathways from initial police contact to hardened recidivist trajectories. Integrating trauma-informed criminology, procedural justice theory, and labeling theory, the study demonstrates how custodial misconduct precipitates institutional mistrust, identity transformation, and intent to reoffend. Triangulation with lawyers and correctional officials corroborates these accounts and identifies structural drivers, including confession-based policing, inadequate forensic infrastructure, and normalized impunity. By foregrounding custody-based abuse as a central yet under-examined link between policing and youth recidivism in a Global South context, the study challenges deterrence-oriented models of crime control and underscores the need for accountability reforms, professionalized investigation, and trauma-informed rehabilitation to disrupt cycles of violence, mistrust, and reoffending.
Keywords: Police misconduct; Custodial violence; Youth recidivism; Procedural justice; Trauma-informed criminology; Labeling theory; Colonial policing; Global South criminal justice; Pakistan.
